


Seeds You're Sowing

by Enamoratrix



Category: Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Meta, One-Sided Relationship, So meta it's almost a not!fic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 04:32:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enamoratrix/pseuds/Enamoratrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was something Penny's parents had heard whispers of as they mingled nervously with the nouveaux-riches at high-end parties: the Dollhouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeds You're Sowing

Here’s a story of a girl who lost her life for nothing.

It was supposed to be a gift that would change her life, not end it. Penny’s parents knew that they had failed her irreparably. They hadn’t spoken to her since she was 17. When they came into a bit of money, they decided to spend it exclusively on her. But what present could they possibly give her that wouldn’t seem like a slap in the face when viewed alongside a painful and neglected childhood?

The first difficulty in selecting a gift was that Penny was nothing like them. She was quiet, but well-spoken. A philanthropic idealist, but with enough experiential realism to make her bleeding-heart efforts effective. She didn’t always express her feelings, but she also felt no shame for them. She was breezily charming, quick to smile, and genuine. She was everything they weren’t.

These things they learned from a private detective. They were too cowardly to reintroduce themselves into her life. And the last seemingly-paradoxical thing they learned was that although she was surrounded by people in her charity work, she was lonely. She had learned to combat her own unhappiness only by alleviating others’. She had no idea how to care for herself, not really. They had never taught her how.

And that’s when the idea struck them. It was something they’d heard whispers of as they mingled nervously with the nouveaux-riches at high-end parties: the Dollhouse.

Clumsily exploiting their new connections, they arranged a meeting with a Ms. Adelle DeWitt. It was simple from there. They devised the sort of person the Penny they had come to know (secondhand) would want—no, need. Ms. DeWitt was very clear on that point.

Penny needed someone who complemented her, who filled in the jagged gaps they had left in her life. She needed someone talkative, straightforward, energetic, bold - a traditional paragon of American values. A superhero.

And thus “Captain Hammer” was born, bits and pieces of a handful of real personalities wall-papered into the attic space of a doll called Yankee. It was a bit poetic, even. Yankee became the American dream.

What they failed to understand was that the webs of causality at work in the world were beyond the capacity of human beings to predict. The world is in chaos, possible outcomes shifting and shuffling like a deck of cards. There were several factors that Penny’s parents and the Dollhouse both failed to account for, the most important being the incorrigible American-ness of the Captain Hammer persona, the intricate laws of attraction, and a boy called Billy.

The initial meeting between Captain Hammer and Penny was even better than they’d expected. They had sent the Captain down the street where they knew Penny would be soliciting signatures, more or less letting him loose and pointing him in the right direction. But with the unexpected intervention of Billy, the standard “boy-meets-girl” scenario became a “superhero-saves-girl” scenario. Penny fell fast, and the papers ate it up.

Captain Hammer truly was America incarnate: casually aggressive, presumptuous, narcissistic, and self-congratulatory. And those traits endeared him to the American people in a way that they didn’t predict. Captain Hammer wormed his way into the rotten apple core of the public eye and stayed there. Ms. DeWitt considered pulling Yankee out of the engagement, but upon further consideration, realized what an asset he was. The Rossum Corporation was never one to to sacrifice assets, even accidental ones.

Thus, Captain Hammer - literally conceived as the dashing suitor whose attentions would jump-start Penny’s confidence and guide her along the road to personal happiness - became a long-term engagement. As an insurance policy, they imprinted Kilo as a fanatical Captain Hammer fangirl. She dutifully trailed him everywhere, along with a pair of homegrown Hammer fiends. At one point, the trio stumbled upon what they thought was the Captain’s dry-cleaning bill, which Boyd and Dominic both interpreted as a sign of recklessness on the part of the L.A. House (how any of them could mistake Topher’s bill for Captain Hammer’s - with four sweater vests on it, for God’s sake - was beyond anyone’s comprehension).

Neither the Dollhouse nor Penny’s parents predicted that Captain Hammer wouldn’t be enough for Penny; “pretty okay” was hardly an awestruck reaction. Nor did they predict that Penny’s heart-on-her-sleeve sweetness and warmth had already attracted a suitor, of sorts, one who was the absolute antithesis of Captain Hammer: Billy, the civilian side of Dr. Horrible. And most importantly, no one - not the Dollhouse, not Penny’s parents, not even Billy Boy himself - predicted that the freeze ray would power down.

It was on this fulcrum that their contrived romance pivoted, and rapidly devolved into a classical tragedy. Penny had left Hammer’s side, put off by his preening and bragging. Billy, as his Horrible alter ego, had built a freeze ray that successfully froze Captain Hammer. He had melodically monologued about his pseudo-anarchical politics and had hesitated only a moment before killing Captain Hammer/Yankee, tabloid darling and Rossum asset.

But in that space of indecision, everything changed. The freeze ray broke down. Captain Hammer sprang into action, commandeering Billy’s damaged death ray (against the better judgment they hadn’t programmed him to possess). Their active blithely attempted to kill Billy, causing an explosion of sharp debris that ultimately killed Penny.

Captain Hammer was disgraced; the Dollhouse let his star fade out before wiping Yankee and putting him back in the box, so to speak. Rossum moved on to its next scheme. Topher wore his clean sweater-vests, and Dr. Horrible became a living, breathing threat. Penny, or rather, the idea of Penny, was the coin that tipped the scales of Billy’s moral code, setting off a lifetime of destruction and self-destructiveness.

But what of Penny herself?

They had no way of knowing it would end in her death, it was true; but she was the only innocent party in a confluence of forces that conspired against her. Maybe the Fates simply cut her thread. It’s possible. But maybe the fatal flaw was that those forces were unleashed by human hands at all. Penny was not their precious child, arm-candy girlfriend, juvenile crush, gossip rag cover-girl. Penny was Penny. She was a person, devoted to bringing meaning to her life.

And perhaps the only mercy she was given was this: that she died having no idea that everything she ever wanted was cut down by an utterly meaningless mistake.

**Author's Note:**

> This entire thing sprang from the idea that the "four sweater vests" were Topher's, not Captain Hammer's. I wish I were kidding.


End file.
